The present invention relates to a technique for providing helpful information for future technology projection by analyzing technical literatures, and particularly to a technique for estimating how long until a technology will be implemented and how large the business impact may be, by use of the contents of problem-describing sections and effect-describing sections in descriptions of technical literatures. Here, the problem-describing section is one in which problems to be solved are described, and the effect-describing section is one in which effects to be achieved by proposed solving means are described.
In recent years, social impacts of new technologies have been increasing more and more, and it has become a matter of life and death for companies to accurately understand technological trends. For this reason, heretofore, technological trends has been manually analyzed and grasped by referring to technical literatures such as patent documents and scientific literatures. However, since such manual analysis relies on intuition and experience of a person in charge of the analysis, the quality of outcome is not constant. Moreover, it is impossible to exhaustively survey a huge amount of technical literatures. Accordingly, some kind of technical support is required to carry out a highly credible technological trend survey at low personal and time costs.
A technique of automating evaluation and analysis of technical literatures through computer processing is disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication Number 2005-149346. In accordance with a technique disclosed in JPA-2005-149346, keywords or keyword candidates are automatically extracted from literature information. Then, through the analysis of these keywords with a statistical technique, symbols corresponding to the respective keywords are arranged on a two-dimensional plane, and also the presence of all the literature is expressed as a distribution density on the same two-dimensional plane.
In addition, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication Number 2004-220456 discloses another conventional technique. In this technique, from each sentence pattern composed of a subject (S), a predicate (V) and an object (O) described in each piece of technical literature, a combination of the predicate and the object is extracted as an item (VO=P). Then, the item (VO=P) is set on one axis while an item of the subject (S) is set on the other axis. Thereafter, the number of technical literatures including the two items is shown at an intersection of the two items on the respective axes.
A patent map or a technology map automatically generated with any of the conventional techniques including the above two patent documents indicates an overall expansion of a large amount of technical literature, and a concentration of the technical literatures in a particular area. However, the map does not provide more detailed information, such as information on what will be accomplished with the technology, and information on how long until a technology will be implemented and how large the business impact may be. For this reason, from the conventional technology map thus automatically generated, it is not possible to find a technology having a business value and to know a difficulty level for implementing the technology.